Playwrights' Perspective: TEETH
From the playwrights: Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs
In my writing process there’s always a point when I have to stop thinking about the characters in theoretical terms and start embodying them in order to imbue their stories with greater emotional depth. With Teeth, that was somewhat easier to do because I was raised in a Christian household as a weekly member of a Baptist church, playing piano for three church choirs and going to Vacation Bible School almost every summer for 18 years. But that also meant stepping back into an ideology I hadn’t considered since I was a teenager flipping through the pages of the Bible, silently questioning everything. In church, I intuited that sex was natural for marriage and reproduction, but also dirty, sinful, and of the flesh that must be crucified to be born again. I also intuited that reconciling one’s spirituality and sexuality was impossible. Add being homosexual to it and it was even more of a non-starter. As a result, shame and desire were always in competition in my body.
In Teeth, all the characters share a similar desire/shame spiral which leads to transformations that put them either in concert or conflict with “the patriarchy.” But for them, the patriarchy is not about who gets to be CEO or President. It’s about who gets to have dominion over their (or others’) bodies. And the universe. In Teeth, confronting the patriarchy means confronting God the Father and the mythology from which he sprang. That’s a confrontation I’ve been itching to have ever since I first read about Adam and Eve being punished with exile from the Garden of Eden. And for what? Simple disobedience? Eating the forbidden fruit and coming to knowledge about their own bodies? And what about passing Original Sin down to all humankind? How does that work exactly? I’m reminded of singer-songwriter Tori Amos who once sang “I think the Good Book is missing some pages” in her own confrontation with God the Father as she attempted to marry the spiritual and the sexual without shame in her body. I like to imagine that Teeth represents our jagged entry scrawled into that same Good Book’s mythology.
— Michael R. Jackson
Until Michael and I started writing Teeth, I thought I was immune to the type of shame that the musical’s protagonist, Dawn, wrestles with as a young, Evangelical Christian woman.
I grew up in a pretty secular household. My Dad’s family’s Jewish and my Mum’s family’s Lebanese Maronite Christian, but neither one of my parents are particularly observant, and I fondly recall my adolescence as being a whirl of Christmas trees and Menorahs and conversations about global warming and boyfriends staying over and packs of condoms magically materializing in the cabinets of our upstairs bathroom. I was about as far-removed as a person can get from the purity culture that defines Dawn’s world.
But the more I composed for Dawn, the more I embodied her, and the more I embodied her, the more I was flooded with icky, uncomfortable memories: memories of feeling revolted by the way my body took on puberty, like I’d somehow followed a recipe wrong; memories of feeling like a tease and a killjoy anytime I’d extract myself from a boy who wanted to get more physical than I did; memories of feeling like I was too desirous and too overbearing and altogether just too much for the female form I inhabited. Through writing Dawn, I’ve been able to hold space for all the shame tangled up with these memories, and even make some peace with it. Which is good, because otherwise I might be stuck with a set of teeth in my vagina.
— Anna K. Jacobs
